• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 389 0

milestones. The toddler, entranced by fairy tales filled with all-good and all-bad characters, encounters numerous situations in which he uses splitting as a primary coping strategy. (Snow White, for example, can only be conceptualized as all-good and the evil queen as all-bad; the fairy tale does not elicit sympathy for a queen who may be a product of a chaotic upbringing or criticism of the heroine’s cohabitation with the seven short guys!) Though now trusting mother’s permanent presence, the growing child must still contend with the fear of losing her love. The four-year-old who is scolded for being “bad” may feel threatened with the withdrawal of mother’s love; he cannot yet conceive of the possibility that mother may be expressing her own frustrations quite apart from his own behavior, nor has he learned that mother can be angry and yet love him just as much at the same time.

Eventually, children are confronted with the separation anxiety of starting school. “School phobia” is neither a real phobia nor related exclusively to school itself, but instead represents the subtle interplay between the child’s anxiety and the reactions of parents who may reinforce the child’s clinging with their own ambivalence about the separation.

Adolescent Conflicts

Separation-individuation issues are repeated during adolescence, when questions of identity and closeness to others once again become vital concerns. During both the rapprochement phase of infancy and adolescence, the child’s primary mode of relating is less acting than reacting to others, especially parents. While the two-year-old tries to elicit approval and admiration from parents by molding his identity to emulate caregivers, the adolescent tries to emulate peers or adopts behaviors that are consciously different—even opposite—from those of parents. In both stages, the child’s behavior is based less on independently determined internal needs than on reacting to the significant people in the immediate environment. Behavior then becomes a quest to discover identity rather than to reinforce an established one.

An insecure teenager may ruminate endlessly about her boyfriend in a “he loves me, he loves me not” fashion. Failure to integrate these positive and negative emotions and to establish a firm, consistent perception of others leads to continued splitting as a defense mechanism. The adolescent’s failure to maintain object constancy results in later problems with sustaining consistent, trusting relationships, establishing a core sense of identity, and tolerating anxiety and frustration.

Often, entire families adopt a borderline system of interaction, with the family members’ undifferentiated identities alternately merging with and separating from each other. Melanie, the adolescent daughter in one such family, closely identified with her chronically depressed mother, who felt abandoned by her philandering husband. With her husband often away from home and her other children of much younger age, the mother fastened onto her teenage daughter, relating intimate details of the unhappy marriage and invading the teenager’s privacy with intrusive questions about her friends and activities. Melanie’s feelings of responsibility for her mother’s happiness interfered to the point where she could not attend to her own needs. She even selected a college nearby so she could continue to live at home. Eventually, Melanie developed anorexia nervosa, which became her primary mechanism for feeling in control, independent, and comforted.

Similarly, Melanie’s mother felt responsible and guilty for her daughter’s illness. The mother sought relief in extravagant spending sprees (which she concealed from her husband) and then covered the bills by stealing money from her daughter’s bank account. Mother, father, and daughter were trapped in a dysfunctional family swamp, which they were unwilling to confront and from which they were unable to escape. In such cases, treatment of the borderline may require treatment of the entire family (see chapter 7).

Traumas

Major traumas—parental loss,